Old and New Social Movement
Recently,
some scholars of social movements have distinguished between old and new
social movements. In their view, old social movements are concerned with
issues of rights and the distribution of resources, for example the civil
rights movement of the 1960s (Tarrow, 1991). New social movements are
concerned with values (primarily postmodern and postmaterialistic),
lifestyles, and self-actualization, especially among marginalized groups (Klandermans,
1991).2 They are concerned with what some call identity politics
(Anspach, 1979).
Cross-disability
demands appear to be split into two major sets. Old social movement demands
are concerned with the extension of the frame of civil rights to people with
impairments; basically these civil rights are concerned with access (Barnartt
and Seelman, 1988). The new social movement demands are concerned with
lifestyle and attitudinal issues. DeJong (1983) calls the two sets of demands
those for civil rights and civil benefits, while Pfeiffer (1993: 727) calls
this the split between demands for rights and demands for services. The two
groups of demands may also be called the disability rights movement and the
independent living movement, although some people writing about collective
action in the disability community seem to use the words interchangeably.
If
these two sets of demands exist simultaneously, this suggests that both an old
and a new social movement may be occurring contemporaneously. It is not clear
without examination of data whether the split between the types of demands being
made is wide enough to support this argument. This issue will be examined in
later chapters.
If
social movement theorists are correct, this conjunction of old and new social
movements should be impossible. However, it is clear that it has happened
before, in the 1970s women’s movement, when one part of the movement demanded
an extension of the frame of civil rights, equality, and nondiscrimination and
the other part focused on consciousness-raising. The demands were being made by
two distinct sets of supporters, who also used different tactics to achieve
their ends—protests used by the former and consciousness raising sessions used
by the latter (Freeman, 1975). It also occurred in the civil rights movement,
when the black power movement was concerned with values and life styles at the
same time that the other segment of the movement was concerned with civil
rights. In that situation, also, it appeared that the people in these movements
were different.